Triumphal rhetoric aside, the economic evidence shows tariffs delivered distortion—not a miracle.

At the end of January, President Trump penned a triumphant op-ed declaring “Mission Accomplished” for the signature economic policy of his second term: tariffs.

Unfortunately, his entire victory lap revolved around phony numbers, cherry-picked facts, and a strawman caricature of his critics’ arguments.

Trump began by claiming all the “so-called experts” predicted his tariffs would trigger “a global economic meltdown.” Instead, he boasts, they’ve ushered in “an American economic miracle.”

He’s wrong on both counts.

It’s true that some economists did fear a recession right after his “Liberation Day” extravaganza. But that was before the president “chickened out” less than a week later. Why, pray tell, did the self-styled “Tariff Man” get cold feet? Lest we fall prey to his attempt to retcon that episode: GDP growth did decline, the stock market did crash, and bond markets did signal a five-alarm fire.

Once Trump retreated, economists recalibrated. As John Maynard Keynes supposedly quipped, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” No credible economists predicted that his revised, milder slate of tariffs would plunge us into depression.

Why not? There are many reasons. Most notably, the US is a massive economy, so trade, while vital, accounts for a fairly small share of our GDP. Tariffs are thus unlikely to cause a recession.

Tariffs disrupt economic activity mainly by diverting resources away from their most productive uses. They also limit people’s choices and lower the quality of products we can buy. All this inhibits growth, just not in ways that sharply reduce GDP (at least not in the short run). The damage that tariffs inflict is more akin to a slow-moving cancer than a sudden heart attack.

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